1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video synchronization.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It has been proposed to distribute video data over an asynchronous switched network. The data may be distributed to many receivers which process the data independently of one another. Some processes at the receivers require two video streams to be processed synchronously, for example a simple cut between two video streams must be accurate to one frame boundary. However an asynchronous network does not inherently maintain frame synchronization and different paths taken by the video streams through the network may be subject to different delays.
A prior proposal, demonstrated at the NAB 2001 conference, distributed video data over a network. Timing data linking local clocks to a reference clock was distributed over another, separate, network
ITU-T Rec H222.0 (1995E) discloses that within the lTU-T Rec H222.01 ISO/IEC 13818-1 systems data stream (i.e. MPEG) there are clock reference time stamps called System Clock References (SCRs). The SCRs are samples of the System Time Clock (STC). They have a resolution of one part in 27 MHz and occur at intervals of up to 1OO ms in Transport Streams and up to 700 ms in Program Streams. Each Program Stream may have a different STC. The SCR field indicates the correct value of the STC of an encoder at the time the SCR is received at a corresponding decoder. With matched encoder and decoder clock frequencies, any correct SCR value can be used to set the instantaneous value of the decoder's STC. This condition is true provided there is no discontinuity of timing, for example the end of a Program Stream. In practice the free running frequencies of the clocks will not be matched. Thus there is a need to match or “slave” the clock of the decoder (a voltage controlled oscillator) to that of the encoder using a Phase Locked Loop (PLL). At the moment each SCR arrives at the decoder it is compared with the STC of the decoder. The difference, (SCR-STC), is an error which is applied to a low pass filter and a gain stage to generate a control value for the voltage controlled oscillator at the decoder.
The system described above uses a synchronous network and locks the absolute time of the decoder clocks to the reference clock.
The present invention seeks to provide frame synchronization of video streams at a destination at which the streams are processed, the destinations being linked to sources of the video streams by an asynchronous packet switched network without necessarily requiring infrastructure additional to the network.